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		<title>Why Marcus Stroman is Primed to Take a Big Step Forward in 2017</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2016/12/15/why-marcus-stroman-is-primed-to-take-a-big-step-forward-in-2017/</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Dec 2016 11:30:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joshua Howsam]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Marcus Stroman]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=8342</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s not exactly a secret that Marcus Stroman didn’t have the year he and everybody else expected of him in 2016. Going into the season, the 25-year-old starter was being talked about as a dark horse Cy Young Award candidate. At minimum, he was viewed as the most likely “ace” among a rotation that wasn’t [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>It’s not exactly a secret that Marcus Stroman didn’t have the year he and everybody else expected of him in 2016. Going into the season, the 25-year-old starter was being talked about as a dark horse Cy Young Award candidate. At minimum, he was viewed as the most likely “ace” among a rotation that wasn’t supposed to possess the real thing. The rotation did end up with some ace-level performances (from both J.A. Happ and Aaron Sanchez), but Stroman wasn’t that guy. His 204 innings (not including two postseason starts) were exactly what the Jays were hoping for, but the 4.37 ERA was not.</p>
<p>Now the local talk shows are using Stroman’s name in trade suggestions, while national writers <a href="http://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/morosi-blackmon-good-fit-jays-might-cost-stroman/" target="_blank">toss it around in rumours</a>. It is as though, just one year removed from extreme expectations, the baseball world no longer believes Marcus Stroman can be an elite pitcher. They’re wrong.</p>
<p>From the start of July until the end of the season, Stroman posted a 3.42 ERA, well down from his 5.33 ERA in the first half. His swing and miss percentage rose from 9.1 percent to 11.1 percent. His walk rate fell from 7.1 percent to 5.5 percent. In short, he was a <em>much</em> better pitcher.</p>
<p>In <a title="The Blue Jays Rotation Might be Just as Good as Boston’s" href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2016/12/07/the-blue-jays-rotation-might-be-just-as-good-as-bostons/" target="_blank">my recent piece comparing the Toronto and Boston rotations</a>, I attributed much of that change to his increased offspeed rate and less reliance on his excellent sinker, but there’s more to it, and that could mean yet another leap forward for the young hurler.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a clip of Randy Johnson speaking on his career. While they&#8217;re far from similar pitchers, there are a few notes that we can draw from the clip (0:20 mark, and again around 1:30).</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Randy Johnson on Learning to be Pitcher vs Thrower &amp; Learning By Watching Others. <a href="https://t.co/hA3ohCOoRQ">pic.twitter.com/hA3ohCOoRQ</a></p>
<p>&mdash; Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) <a href="https://twitter.com/PitchingNinja/status/809103788569194497">December 14, 2016</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p>To be clear, I’m not trying to say that Marcus Stroman is a “thrower” or that he isn&#8217;t a &#8220;smart pitcher.&#8221; It’s very clearly the opposite; Stroman is <em>always</em> making adjustments. Instead, the point here is that like the Hall of Famer, Stroman can emulate another pitcher to see how to take that next step. He doesn’t even have to search very far to find him.</p>
<p>Back in July, <a title="How J.A. Happ Evolved Into One of Baseball’s Best" href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2016/08/31/how-j-a-happ-evolved-into-one-of-baseballs-best/" target="_blank">I wrote about how</a> J.A. Happ had a particular unique skill when it came to his fastballs. With slightly over 5” of vertical break between his fourseamer and his sinker, Happ led all of baseball among qualified pitchers. Qualified, in this sense, meant 500 of each pitch had been thrown. Over 32 starts, that’s under 16 per game.</p>
<p>If you drop the threshold to 200 (or 6.25 per over 32 starts), J.A. Happ actually falls to third. Vincent Velasquez sits in second, and you can probably guess who comes in at number one: <a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5npos46SlabM0xvNHA4QUxxTHM" target="_blank">Marcus Stroman</a>.</p>
<p>Unlike Velasquez, who is just barely ahead of Happ (only 0.13 inches apart), Stroman is a clear frontrunner. With 5.52” of difference between the sink of his fourseam and sinker, Stroman gets a full half inch of extra break over his left handed teammate. For a better scale, he is 2.88 standard deviations above the mean, and 0.35 standard deviations above <em>second place</em>. Stroman is a clear outlier.</p>
<p>This brings us back to Happ. As I mentioned in that piece on him linked above, what made J.A. Happ successful in 2016 wasn&#8217;t just stuff, it was how he used it. He made gains in Pittsburgh through fixing his mechanics, but he really came in to his own when he started mixing up his pitches a bit. He still relied heavily on the fourseam fastball, but what changed was that in addition to that four seamer Happ began throwing his sinker with some regularity. That forced hitters to not only deal with adjusting to speed differences on pitches, but also extreme changes in movement within a given speed range. As a result, hitters became worse against <em>all </em>of his pitches.</p>
<p>Stroman already has the command that Happ needed to gain in Pittsburgh. If he can start mixing in the fourseam fastball better with his unbelievable sinker, he can potentially achieve the same effect. He started doing that in July, going from 3.2 percent fourseam usage to up to 13.8 and, if he goes even higher, there could be yet another boost in his numbers.</p>
<p>But that’s not it for Stroman. He possesses <em>three</em> fastballs, and it just so happens that the other one is an outlier too.</p>
<p>Among pitchers who threw 200 cutters last year, Marcus Stroman’s had the fourth most sink, fighting gravity at 2.2”. Now, fourth place doesn’t exactly sound like an outlier, but what sets him apart is how it relates to his other fastballs. Bud Norris, Chris Tillman, and Matt Andriese all get more sink on their cutters. However, for each of those pitchers, the cutter was approximately six miles per hour slower than their regular fastball. That, in essence, makes them look like a completely different pitch.</p>
<p>Marcus Stroman’s is only three miles per hour slower.</p>
<p>That essentially moves Stroman&#8217;s cutter into the number one spot, with nearly a full inch more sink than Ian Kennedy gets on his cutter (3.13&#8243;). The horizontal movement on the offering was nothing to laugh at either. Among pitchers with a speed difference of four miles an hour or less between the fourseam/sinker and the cutter, Stroman’s 1.71” to the glove side of center ranked sixth, and only two of the five ahead of him (Samardzija and Kluber) threw the pitch over 90 mph.</p>
<p>When you put them all together, Stroman’s three fastballs look something like this (Hitter POV- Y axis is the vertical movement and the X-axis is the horizontal to simulate outcomes with same release angle):</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/12/stro4.png"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-8368" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/12/stro4.png" alt="stro4" width="450" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>As you can see, Stroman has three fastballs that have a difference in absolute break between them of over six inches each (nobody else in baseball can say that), two of which are over seven inches. He also throws each one with the <a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/12/Brooksbaseball-Chart-2.jpeg" target="_blank">same release point</a>, and all at 91 mph or higher. That means that after a hitter determines the initial flight path of the pitch <em>and</em> realizes a fastball is coming, he <em>still </em>has to cover an area of 20.7 square inches. That&#8217;s absurd.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s pretty easy to see how valuable Stroman&#8217;s fastballs can be if used effectively. It looks like he (or someone else on the Jays) started to figure it out as well. Last year, he threw 47.6 percent sinkers, 8.8 percent fourseamers, and 12.3 percent cutters. In September, those numbers had switched to 19.5, 38.1, and 18.0, respectively. As Stroman brings the usage rates even closer together, and combines that with continued liberal use of his excellent offspeed pitches, there&#8217;s a very good chance he joins Happ and his pal Sanchez and gets closer to becoming the &#8220;ace&#8221; we all expected him to be.</p>
<p><em>Lead Photo: © John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports</em></p>
<p><em> Stats compiled using <a href="http://www.baseballprospectus.com/pitchfx/leaderboards/" target="_blank">BP PITCHf/x leaderboards</a>/<a href="http://www.brooksbaseball.net/" target="_blank">Brooks Baseball</a></em></p>
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		<title>This Week in Blue Jays: Remembering R.A. Dickey, the Hopeful Ace</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2016/09/25/this-week-in-blue-jays-remembering-r-a-dickey-the-hopeful-ace/</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 25 Sep 2016 11:36:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jenn Smith]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[This Week in Blue Jays]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[r.a. dickey]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=6911</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[His final line read as such: 0.1 IP, 0 hits, 1 run (0 earned), 0 strikeouts, 0 walks, 11 pitches, and 7 strikes. Losing pitcher of record. While the Seattle Mariners were celebrating their extra-innings walk-off win against the Blue Jays Wednesday evening, R.A. Dickey walked off the mound for what may have been the [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>His final line read as such: 0.1 IP, 0 hits, 1 run (0 earned), 0 strikeouts, 0 walks, 11 pitches, and 7 strikes. Losing pitcher of record.</p>
<p>While the Seattle Mariners were celebrating their extra-innings walk-off win against the Blue Jays Wednesday evening, R.A. Dickey walked off the mound for what may have been the last time in a Toronto uniform.</p>
<p>It was a moment of heartbreak for both players and fans. After a spectacular one-out home run by Jose Bautista to tie the game at one run apiece, John Gibbons finally gave the nod to Dickey, marking his first relief appearance since being traded to Toronto. Three batters later, after a fielding error, sacrifice bunt, and sacrifice fly, Dickey was tagged with a loss that, perhaps more than any other, was indicative of his tenure in Toronto.</p>
<p>If that was indeed Dickey’s last outing as a Blue Jay, how will his time in Toronto be remembered?</p>
<p>Harken back to a mid-December day in 2012, when the Toronto Blue Jays excitedly announced that they had traded for the reigning NL Cy Young award winner, along with Josh Thole and Mike Nickeas, in exchange for Travis d’Arnaud, Noah Syndergaard, John Buck and Wuilmer Becerra. The deal was woven into a much broader scheme to drastically revamp the team. This was, of course, the same offseason as the blockbuster trade with the Miami Marlins that brought Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Josh Johnson to the Jays. The Jays had set the baseball world on fire; 2013 would be their year.</p>
<p>At the time of the trade, the average Jays fans likely knew little, if anything at all, about R.A. Dickey except the manner in which he was presented to them: the reigning National League Cy Young winner who had won 20 games the previous season with an ERA of 2.73 over 233.2 innings pitched. Within the context of the rebuild, he was the final piece in the puzzle, a legitimate ace who would help lead the Jays back to the promised land of the playoffs.</p>
<p>That Dickey had been anointed the staff’s ace prior to throwing a pitch for the Jays was made apparent when during spring training manager John Gibbons announced that Dickey would be 2013’s opening day starter. By the time April 2 rolled around, the 2013 season hype had been in overdrive for months, and fans were eager for a run at the postseason.</p>
<p>Dickey was the losing pitcher of record for that opening day start, surrendering four runs (three earned) on five hits including a home run over six innings in a loss that epitomized the remainder of the season: great promise turned to great disappointment as the Jays finished the season 74-88.</p>
<p>In hindsight, that first start encapsulated much of his tenure in Toronto – Dickey pitched well enough to give his team a chance to win but was ultimately tagged with the loss. In his 130 games started for the Jays, Dickey average 6.34 innings per outing while the Jays provided an average of just 3.13 runs in support. Though he was never worse than league average, R.A. Dickey, with his oddball pitch and unconventional mannerisms, became the focus for many disgruntled fans. He was an easy target during those first two seasons for failing to deliver on what fans thought was the promise of an ace; and then, he became a target for being exactly what he had been his entire time in Toronto – a solid number four or five starter who, for reasons I find inexplicable, was deemed as inadequate for a playoff team.</p>
<p>The question is: was this fair? In a word, the answer is no.</p>
<p>The expectations heaped upon R.A. Dickey when he arrived in Toronto were enormous and, quite frankly, impossible to live up to. He was presented to fans as a legitimate ace for having won the Cy Young award the previous season. And, while those fans who followed baseball beyond the scope of Toronto were likely far more reserved in their excitement at his acquisition, the average Jays fan knew only of how he had been presented to them.</p>
<p>What perhaps was made unclear to the average fan was his Cy Young season had been the exception rather than the norm; that within the context of the American League East his knuckleball might not prove perilous to opposing hitters, particularly within the confines of the homerun-friendly Rogers Centre. Within the context of the climate created at the time, Dickey was destined to fall short of expectations, because those expectations had been set so unattainably high.</p>
<p>It is also unfair to judge Dickey’s time here against that on which the Jays lost out; flamethrower Noah Syndergaard has established himself as a true ace for the Mets, adding fuel to fire that seems to be stoked each and every time Dickey falters on the mound. Though both fans and the Jays organization may lament the loss of Syndergaard, the team traded him away willingly for what was at the time a known quantity, choosing a veteran over a prospect in a win-now scenario. To be disgruntled about the trade is entirely fair; to hold it against Dickey, who worked tirelessly and gave his very best, despite his best not always appearing to be so, is entirely unfair.</p>
<p>There is no doubt that the trade itself was a bust, particularly if Syndergaard continues to excel. That cannot be undone. If evaluating Dickey&#8217;s legacy  on his own merit, I believe it will mirror his four years in Toronto &#8211; he will be remembered as an average pitcher who could both dazzle and distress, often within the same game. He pitched gems and duds to a near-.500 record (he was 49-52 in Toronto) for a team that made the playoffs two of his four years in a Jays&#8217; uniform. To put it succinctly, the reviews will be mixed.</p>
<p>With Dickey’s future in baseball unclear &#8211; he is considering retirement &#8211; what is clear is the legacy he will leave behind for the baseball community as a whole. R.A. Dickey was not your prototypical athlete. He had to reinvent himself to remain relevant, toiling away with a trick pitch for which there was little guidance or understanding, carving himself out a niche in a world where fastball is king. When he used phrases such as &#8220;capricious animal&#8221; to explain why his knuckleball didn&#8217;t dance on a particular night, I never saw him as making excuses for himself; rather, I viewed him as someone cerebral who was searching for answers, something to which we can all relate. Quiet, reserved, set apart by age and circumstances, Dickey seemingly never quite fit in. But, while images of Dioner Navarro wearing a police officer&#8217;s hat or Jose Bautista smoking a cigar surrounded by a cloud of smoke after winning the AL East are inherently cool, there was nothing more joyous than seeing R.A. Dickey run gleefully around the entire stadium high-fiving fans like a little kid rekindling his love of baseball.</p>
<p>This is a man, after all, who shouldered the burden of speaking up about being a survivor of sexual abuse, and though the sports world has an awfully long way to go, his bravery to open up about something that is so rarely discussed within the world of professional sports no doubt helped pave the way for other survivors to share their stories. It is something that cannot and should not be overlooked when considering his contributions to baseball.</p>
<p>Think of him what you will, but I sincerely hope that he&#8217;ll receive the opportunity to take the mound one more time in Toronto, even if to face just one batter in relief. I, for one, would like to see him walk off the mound to applause so that both player and fans can acknowledge one another before parting ways.</p>
<p>In my estimation, R.A. Dickey deserves to go out like that.</p>
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